Admin Accountability

@Tez said in Bannings:

@Meg said in Bannings:

this situation happened very specifically because of power invested in one person.

Pulling this thread out bc I was thinking about it last night, you know, in that ‘lie in bed and think about things as you fall asleep’ kind of way. I wonder if there are good ways to build checks for that kind of thing, have some kind of accountability baked in. Right now, I own the server. Glitch handles the subdomain stuff. Pyre and Pavel are admin. But if I suddenly fired everyone, like – in the end, that’s where it stops. With the person who has the keys to the server account. How do you build in checks?

there’s no way really, that i can think of. there’s just the community reaction.

@Tez said in Bannings:

I mean right now your only guarantee is that if I go mad with power then Roz will gently smother me in my sleep.

She might do that anyway

@Tez You can give more than one person server access, but at the end of the day, someone who can burn down the server can burn down the server.

I do think that in general PUBLICLY STATING how you hold yourself accountable and what people can expect from you is part of the check process. It at least gives you a moment’s pause. If you have out there (as this board, for example, does) that no permanent bans will be given without approval from all mods, then when you do that, it’s VERY CLEAR that you overstepped.

You can keep overstepping, but what you can’t do is argue that it was all within your rights as admin. Not credibly, anyway. Because you’ve said it wasn’t.

PS I’ve also been thinking these thoughts and kind of think they’re worth their own thread.

The buck always has to stop somewhere, unfortunately; all the checks in the world can’t change the fact that somebody owns the place.

It’s precisely the same as owning a game server, and the accountability of being a game lead and the helplessness (so to speak) of being a player.

You just have to behave like somebody you’d trust, and you have to do it always, and you have to have GOOD FRIENDS who will tell you when you’re going down the wrong road. Our job as users is to see that, and see if you aren’t doing it, and then react accordingly.

I don’t think there’s a fix for the potential of game/site owner going mad with power besides the user base leaving and going to make a new place.

One thing I’ve been thinking about as someone who runs games is how to be clear both with my players and my staff about what they can expect from me.

I started admining in a very group-oriented way. Like-- 3-4 people all holding equal power and it was very democratic. And I liked that, and still like it in a lot of ways, but these days sometimes I’m working with people who don’t want all the responsibility, but are really great at certain things, so I’ve found myself doing the headwiz thing. And in that shift, I sometimes made assumptions that I never really made explicit to my staff (or did so only belatedly). In this case, ‘staff’ refers to Storytellers and App Staff, which were different, sometimes overlapping, groups of staffers for me.

Things like

• How do I add new staff? Do I have conversations with current staff? Do I require their approval? Is this process different for different types of staff?

• How do bans come about, when there’s only one headwiz? Am I the final call or the only call? Do I discuss with STs, but handle the player management part of it (ie, the hard conversations) myself? I’ve never really made that process clear, and probably I should.

• For that matter, how do hard conversations come about? Who has access to logs of those? Who needs to know they happened?

• How much responsibility do App Staff or STs or player GMs have for dealing with difficult player behavior? At what point do they call me in, and how? What rights do they have in the moment?

• What do we tell the game at large about bans? What degree of detail?

• How confidential are staff conversations? Are all conversations equally confidential? Story vs player vs venting about how a GMed scene is going in the moment are all very different things.

Some of these are game specific, some apply to a forum like this, too.

@Tat
Lol your post DISAPPEARED from the Bannings thread and I was briefly distraught.

Anyway, we were talking a bit about/around this earlier between ourselves, but once upon a time I had substantive issues with some Game Stuff in your space and the way you responded to me on that I think has made both of us value working together more. That umm doesn’t always happen (and I frankly don’t always judge the effort it worth it because hopping off a game space has never felt like more than a minor inconvenience for me).

But overall I agree that you can build all the rules you want but it’s on whoever pays the bills or has control of the ‘off’ switch to follow them, and you have to make your peace with that and decide whether you’re comfortable with those people. But if they act in ways their users don’t like consistently, they’ll cease to have users. So there’s the push and pull that way. It’s scary in RL relationships and jobs when actual livelihood is on the line but thankfully leaving a MU or subreddit or whatever has never cost me actual money.

@Tez said in Admin Accountability:

I mean right now your only guarantee is that if I go mad with power then Roz will gently smother me in my sleep.

You break the implicit trust we’ve vested in you and I will find you.

In this particular case, I consider the ‘mad with power’ failure mode to be fairly low stakes. Honestly, the system operated about as well as we could possibly hope: the people ‘in charge’ did something which a large portion of the community didn’t agree with, and so that community found/made another place that better aligned with their desires.

That’s not a bad thing. It’s not even really a failure - it’s about the best you can hope for from a community operating entirely on volunteer time and interest. In fact, there are strong parallels to MU*s themselves - when someone builds a game, they’re in charge of that game. You can’t depose them or ‘vote them out’, generally speaking. But if their behavior is such that you no longer feel welcome or interested in engaging there, it’s not hard to find another game. It’s inconvenient, and there’s a cost to it, but no one is trapped.

And, in the end, that’s the best thing that we can hope for, I think - a community will exist as long as people wish to be associated with it. When they no longer desire that, the community will move, change, or disband.

I mean personally, I’m completely comfortable with the “checks” being no more than ‘Roz smothers in sleep for misbehavior’ to be frank. It’s possible your life could change and you could get so stressed you lose your shit and melt down–it can happen to the best of us, clearly.

If we’re looking to troubleshoot the specific issue that has caused a downfall in recent memory, do a vote of confidence with the userbase on potential hires. The problem was the team got tired, bone deep tired, and couldn’t do it any more. So they brought on people who could without consulting anyone they should have, and one of those choices was somebody a lot of people couldn’t trust. That’s where the breakdown started.

@Tez

Loudly promise yourself and us that you will make backups (HERE), and X, Y, and Z have access to them. Do it once a month and use github or something?

I am also of the VERY firm opinion that the HISTORY of this place (and other places) is less important than the COMMUNITY. We’ve lost WORA and Electric Soup and the imagination named one and bad descs – a lot of them, and the loss is nothing, now.

If you’re really super concerned about repeating history…

Make plans NOW as to what you will do when you get too tired to mod. Because THAT is the killer.

Although administrating a forum and running a game are completely different things there is some commonality in the fact you sometimes have to pick your poison and live with what that means.

The model I liked to use was to not rely on authority at all. Being an admin meant only stepping in when shit really hit the fan (‘a troll is making openly racist comments’) or for general boring tasks like moving or merging threads to their appropriate categories. You can’t overuse power you don’t allow yourself to have.

However there were side effects. Some users felt singled out, for example, targeted by bandwagons, and unless the level of moderation itself was changed - which would alter the dynamic - there really wasn’t much I could do. Stepping in to correct this sort of behavior is inherently subjective; I would be using my judgment on who is going too far, or what remark is too mean or personal.

Now, as it was pointed out in this thread’s original message when it comes down to it, someone has power over the server. That person ultimately controls the forum.

However forums - as you are seeing - are easy to spawn. It’s the community around it, voting with its feet, that’s much harder to control.

In my humble opinion that’s who ultimately holds admins accountable. It’s y’all. Take responsibility, don’t tolerate bullshit, respect the thankless work admins are doing and that’s about all you can expect.

@IoleRae said in Admin Accountability:

I mean personally, I’m completely comfortable with the “checks” being no more than ‘Roz smothers in sleep for misbehavior’ to be frank. It’s possible your life could change and you could get so stressed you lose your shit and melt down–it can happen to the best of us, clearly.

If we’re looking to troubleshoot the specific issue that has caused a downfall in recent memory, do a vote of confidence with the userbase on potential hires. The problem was the team got tired, bone deep tired, and couldn’t do it any more. So they brought on people who could without consulting anyone they should have, and one of those choices was somebody a lot of people couldn’t trust. That’s where the breakdown started.

Note that the failure mode of THAT is a board being shut down because the community can’t agree on anyone who a) wants to take on the burden and b) wants to put their trustworthiness up to a majority vote of a community where people can and have held grudges for decades. It’s, again, sort of like a game staffing issue - there’s not exactly a large body of people eager to take on that responsibility, and I suspect that saying ‘in order to do this extra work, you also have to be voted in by people’ would winnow that down fairly significantly.

Just to be frank, I agreed to be an admin because Tez said hey, would you? And I said sure. If there was a ‘hey, would you stand for an election to become an admin’ I would say ‘ohhhhhh nope nope nope nope’.

@Pyrephox

Oh yeah, I don’t think it’s a GOOD idea. It’s just a solution for the specific trouble spot to start from.

@IoleRae said in Admin Accountability:

I am also of the VERY firm opinion that the HISTORY of this place (and other places) is less important than the COMMUNITY. We’ve lost WORA and Electric Soup and the imagination named one and bad descs – a lot of them, and the loss is nothing, now.

At one point someone found Electric Soup on the Way Back Machine but LIKE A FOOL I didn’t bookmark it, so when I wanted to show someone a thread from there last night I couldn’t find it again. It does suck, especially as users get older and busier and institutional knowledge drops off.